in Contemporary Painting
MResearch background
y previous and current books on painting and the artworld include Women Can’t Paint: Gender, the Glass Ceiling and Values in Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury 2020); Wife, Witch, Whore: Essential Conversations about Gender, Art and Culture (in press, Bloomsbury, 2025); and War Paint: a book which examines
gender and painting through our digital artworld in a postcovid, virtual context (Bloomsbury 2026). I’ve also contributed a chapter (Gørrill 2023) shortly to be published in the Routledge International handbook of Gender and Heritage (Ashton 2025), and led talks on gender and the artworld at prominent international institutions, including Bonhams, the European Union, the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Region, Spain; and KMSKA – Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Belgium. Some of my research also focuses on gendered aesthetics, or examining painterly qualities in artworks to determine patterns of creativity, including the manner in which an artist paints be it figuratively (representatively) or through abstraction, its opposite. I will refer to some of this research within this paper.
TIntroduction his exploratory paper aims to develop further discussions on the spectrum and associated tension of abstraction-figuration. It contributes to research which focuses on abstraction and figuration in contemporary painting today. I am keenly interested in gender (see Gørrill 2020, etc.) and how biology impacts upon how others perceive our artwork from a social sciences perspective, and therefore I will also reflect upon the issue of gender throughout this piece.
For the purposes of this present study, the scale of abstraction and figuration is referred to as a spectrum, a measure which may be used to classify something in terms of its position on a scale between two extreme points. Thus if we were to explore the spectrum of abstraction and figuration on a scale of 1-10, we might consider highly abstract works to be sited at point [1], whilst those on the opposite end of the scale – being representational or figurative works of art – might be found at point [10] on the scale. Of course as we all know, there are a substantial number of paintings in circulation today which will hover somewhere between points [1] and [10], refuse to be
categorised, or fluctuate around the [5] mark, being either or neither abstract nor figurative. A significant amount of scholarly activity has been devoted to this area of study in painting. François Jullien’s (2009) book is titled The Great Image has no Form – or on the Non-object in Painting. Here, he argues that a non-objectifying approach stems from the painters’ deeply held belief in a continuum of existence, in which art is not distinct from reality. Karl Ruhrberg and Ingo Walther’s ‘Between Revolt and Acceptance’ in Art of the Twentieth Century (2000) argue that abstract art has survived any number of obituaries, since its birth in circa.1910. On the opposite end of the pendulum we might thus deduce that figurative art has also survived a number of culls and thus a tension develops between the abstract and the representative as being polarised, or polar opposites of the scale which we discuss today. In the New York Review of Books, Jed Perl’s (2022) article ‘Between Abstraction and Representation’ is highly critical of artists who feel they don’t need to polarise themselves and work on either end of the spectrum, with Perl perceiving that something is being lost in the eclecticism of the idea of either/or the abstract or the representational, although Perl is a staunch defender and proponent of contemporary representational painting. This
is an issue which is testily criticised by art critic Barry Schwabsky (2022) who makes it clear that he perceives abstract (or abstracted) paintings to be more interesting than the purely figurative, and argues that there shouldn’t be any war of ideas between the two opposite ends of the spectrum, or that at least abstraction and figuration should not be viewed as opposing forces. Indeed, Schwabsky (2022) observes that in Perl’s view, today’s artistshave lost the passionate commitment that artists of Guston’s time felt toward their artistic choices. They ‘appear to think that it’s possible to be a representational artist one minute andan abstract artistthe next’,he huffs. And yet, while he loves the idea of a battle between abstraction and representation, he says they should not be ‘regarded as ideologies’. That puzzles me. If abstraction and representation don’t amount to what he calls ‘ideological absolutes’, then why dig yourself into the trenches for one of them?
I will return to the above argument later in this paper. Meanwhile, let us now take a glance at the gendered values in abstraction and figuration, and examine what some of our great museums are collecting in the way of abstract and figurative art. This will enable us to envisage the spectrum of abstraction and figuration upon which Perl and
Schwabsky vehemently disagree. The following research includes that from my previous book Women Can’t Paint: Gender, the Glass Ceiling and Values in Contemporary Art (2020); my chapter for Routledge ‘Mind the Gender Gap? A gendered transnational analysis of future heritage through national museums’ contemporary art collections’ (Gørrill 2025); new research from Scotland (MacKinnon 2024; see also MacKinnon 2023) and bespoke work conducted for this present paper through analysis of new collections at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany.
A note on methodology
The method used within the various analyses in this paper use a statistics-based approach (SPSS software) to analyse painterly qualities of artworks in museum collections.
In Women Can’t Paint, I noted that ‘many attempts to understand the feminine and masculine in contemporary art are speculative’, and that more robust visual arts research might be borrowed from our colleagues in applied
mathematics and statistics (Gørrill, 2020, pp.32-33). It is noted that the use of quantitative analysis within visual arts research is often frowned upon by established scholars in the field, many art historians favouring smaller qualitative studies of specific artists’ oeuvres.
The specific forms of statistical enquiry within SPSS were descriptive statistics (frequencies, descriptives, crosstabs) and comparison of means (independent samples t-tests). In ‘How computation changes research’, Ian Foster (2011, p.21) argues that automated analysis can ‘detect patterns that a human cannot’. Such software is also used in the prediction of medical trials and serious illness outcomes, yet in the artworld is often dismissed as being meaningless.
Prior to presenting results, it is usual to offer a note of the methodologies used to conduct one’s research . Within this paper it may be more appropriate to term this a ‘defence’ of the methodology. My previous work has attracted a tantrum of critique from an older generation of prominent feminist art historians (who shall herein remain unnamed). However, I assert it is important to note that in the last fifty years, our world has changed beyond what we previously thought would be possible. A new generation of future artists, gatekeepers and art historians – meet our current
cohort of students who are known as Gen Z, or Zoomers. Such a generation -
typically exit a natural proficient in using digital devices, applications, and online platforms. They adeptly use technology for communication, collaboration and problem-solving, having been exposed to digital tools from an early age (Techstep 2024).
As an educator, I have also observed a new excitement for the use of digital tools in appraising artwork (see MacKinnon 2024; Karami, 2024, etc.) and indeed at the University of Dundee we are actively teaching this to undergraduates. We also have a growing postgraduate research group in the area which is very exciting to see blossom.
WomenCan’tPaint:
Gender,theGlassCeilingandValuesin ContemporaryArt
For my book Women Can’t Paint (Gorrill 2020), I analysed over 5,000 paintings from auction markets, prizes, and that acquired by museums. There is a firm link between artworks found at major auctions, those winning prizes, and those collected by museums so the difference is not as big as some might think. For some of my elite interviews carried out with major curators, they also discussed how they and their trustees actively selected a combination of polarised abstract and figurative artworks which to an extent contradicts Schwabsky’s notion that these polarised positions should not be dichotomous.
The findings were that in the 1990s, abstraction was dominated by men (the masculine), and more women were painting figuratively. On the other hand from 2012 onwards there was a statistically significant switch towards women’s domination of figuration, with there being equal gendered use of abstraction.
In Women Can’t Paint, I also wrote on the “femininity” of abstraction in contemporary painting, where evidence shows that women’s artwork is more likely to be validated if it has been painted in an abstract manner. As an aside, much of my work has focused on the gender pay or value gap in contemporary painting, one of the most shocking findings of my PhD being that when men sign their artwork the value goes up, whereas when women sign their artwork the value goes down! (see also Sieghart 2022).
Also interesting is that there are noteworthy differences in overall price between abstract and figurative work by male and female artists. This shows that on average female abstract works have achieved higher prices than those achieved by males. Meanwhile figurative work by men achieves far higher prices than those of their abstract painting. However, there is a substantial and statistically significant difference between the higher priced figurative works made by male artists, compared to their lower selling female counterparts. It became clear during the course of the research that paintings by women are significantly more likely to fetch higher prices if they are abstract. Conversely, it was found that paintings by male artists were more likely to fetch higher prices if the works were figurative. Statistical
significance was also detected during the analysis of paintings made by men, price, and the issue of abstraction or figuration.
In Differential Aesthetics: Art Practices, Philosophy, and Feminist Understandings (Florence and Foster 2000, p.281), Rosemary Betterton refers to a short essay by Rebecca Fortnum and Gillian Houghton entitled ‘Women and Contemporary Painting: Re-Presenting Representation’. Betterton states, ‘the essay first raised questions of the relationship between women’s politics and non-figurative painting, it is evident there has been precious little further discussion of this subject within feminist critical writing’. the thrust of Houghton and Fortnum’s paper is that abstract female painters have been acknowledged by mainstream art histories in unprecedented numbers, by comparison to figurative female painters. If this is the case, it is possible that female painters may have swayed towards abstraction if it was perceived that there were greater role models operating in this arena, forecasting more chances of possible success to aspiring female painters. Indeed, Fortnum and Houghton argued that there is now a strong and established canon of female abstract painting in operation for students
of art. Therese Oulton (Kent 1986) observed the resistance of definition in her abstract painting:
It is less figurative rather than more abstract not as a deliberate obscuring device, but in order to prevent the naming or fixing of things. It is an intention which is based on the view that recognitionofanobjectimplies thecolonisationand possession of it.
Fortnum and Houghton have argued that the use of abstraction in paintings made by women is a refusal to present a recognisable image to the male viewer and just a refusal to become a passive viewed subject. The refusal to present a recognisable image is at odds with the statement made by American critic Marjorie Kramer (1971), that feminist painting is also always figurative, ‘that figuration was needed to disrupt the dominance of (masculine) modernist painting’ (Carson and Pajaczkowska 2000, p.39). And in a recent catalogue for the all-women Real Lives
Painted Pictures exhibition, artist Barbara Howey observes ‘in this age of mass global image access – through digital technology, figurative painting has seen a resurgence, especially among women painters’ (Robinson 2001). The use of abstraction described above is arguably a reaction against such feminist painting rather than an objective of
feminist painting itself. Indeed in The Obstacle Race, Germaine Greer argues that through the use of abstraction ‘women painters feel freer to express their real selves’. Such observations may help to understand the apparent paradigm shift in the employment of abstraction by contemporary women painters because according to many observers, abstraction appears to have become a more favoured mode of painting for female artists. In Women Can’t Paint (WCP) (2020), I argued that if artists are not supported by parents or partners and need to earn a living income from their painting, it is not unreasonable to suggest they may create more sellable paintings in order to survive. If female auction (secondary market) visibility reflects the primary market, the economic diagnosis above could explain why more female artists are now painting abstractly. Such a concept was broached upon in elite interviews by two male artists I spoke to for WCP, who both sold especially-created market-orientated work –simply because they needed the money. the artists who did not work in such a way appeared to have another source of income, whether this was parental or partner support, Arts Council or similar funding, museum acquisitions or through the means of another job such as teaching alongside the
artist’s studio work. However, the higher financial stake in female abstract paintings does not help to explain the higher financial stake in male figurative paintings – unless of course, such a valuation is prescribed as a reaction to an encroaching female presence, upon a male-dominated market. Nevertheless, the price of being a female artist whether she is renumerated in Dollars, Dirhams, Pounds or Euros, is - whether we like it or not - of huge significance to artists’ survival and success through museum validation as my book evidenced (Gørrill 2020).
European collections
Moving onto museums, a previous study on collections (Mottram and Gørrill 2018) examined 250 artworks from a sample of five national museums across Europe – including Italy, Finland, France, the Netherlands, and the UK. Here, it was found that out of 250 paintings selected for European museum collections, just 30 per cent were able to be identified and defined as clearly abstract. There did appear to be some
patterns in the data, with both male and female artists being equally likely to have painted these works. Although many museums insist on categorising their artworks through the polarised abstract or figurative, I decided that more focused analysis was required on specific painting collections which were carried out as follows:
Focused sample: the UK
The museum selected for this analysis is the Tate –an institution that holds the national collection of British art from 1500 to the present day and international modern and contemporary art (the latter being the focus of this paper). The analysis was carried out in 2023 for ‘Mind the Gender Gap?: A gendered transnational analysis of future heritage through national museums’ contemporary art collections’ (in The International Handbook of Heritage and Gender, Ashton, 2024).
At the Tate (2023) - works which are painted by both men and women and collected through the latest acquisitions - were mostly figurative, rather than abstract.
Focused sample: Finland
KIASMA - the Museum of Contemporary Art, houses the modern and postmodern collections of the Finnish National Gallery (FNG), and is situated in Helsinki. There is very low diasporic activity in terms of artists relocating to work in Finland and therefore the collection is predominantly comprised of Finnish artists. At the FNG - female artists were found to be more likely to be collected when they had painted abstract works, and conversely men were more likely to be collected when they had painted figuratively.
Focused sample: Los Angeles/the USA
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles is an artist-founded museum, which is committed to the collection, presentation, and interpretation of art created after 1940. MOCA’s gender test for abstraction and figuration in paint was shown to be statistically significant, in that the women who they
collected have painted mainly in an abstract format, whilst men were found to paint mainly figurative works.
Abstraction and Figuration through emerging art in Scotland
The Scottish artist and postgraduate researcher
Kirstin MacKinnon (2024) explores art produced in Scotland by emerging painters, in her thesis Gender and Contemporary Scottish Painting: A Critical Analysis of the Place of Painting for Emerging Artists in Scotland Today. MacKinnon is interested in Scottish aesthetics, and to what extent artists may be influenced by cultural differences that may arise from studying in Scotland. To do this, Mackinnon (2024) carried out an analysis of the complete sample of all the artists who were selected for the Royal Scottish Academy New Contemporaries exhibition, who selected the most promising talent in Scotland showcasing 104 graduates selected from the 2022 and 2023 degree shows. MacKinnon observed that men’s paintings currently sit at 7.5 on the spectrum (1= abstract; 10= figurative); whereas women were slightly less likely to work with representation at 6.19
on the spectrum. Overall, we can see that emerging painting in Scotland at present is on the figurative side of the spectrum, at around 7 points. MacKinnon also concluded that Scottish artists appear to remain independent in their work, and are not easily influenced by fleeting movements and fashions in art (see Gage, 1977: 22).
Analysis of the level of abstraction and figuration of the most recent acquisitions dated 2024 at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany
Finally, my own research on prominent German museum the Hamburger Kunsthalle, shows sinilar results. The Hamburger Kunsthalle is one of the largest art museums in Germany. There are 64 images of contemporary paintings included in their online collection, just 20 per cent of these being by female artists.
On the scale of abstraction-figuration, the average point on the scale falls at 5.17.
However, when examining the female artists’ work, this is lower than the overall average, being sited closer to abstraction than figuration on the scale at 3.69.
Summary of findings
In the Finnish, USA/LA, Scottish and German museum collections, women painters were found to be more likely to be included in collections if their works were abstract; whereas men were found to be more likely to be included in collections if their works were figurative.
However, at London’s Tate, both men and women artists included in the most recent acquisitions were mostly painting in a figurative manner. However, it is important to note that for the majority of the collections, the average point on the scale of abstraction-figuration was around 6 pts, hovering half-way between “extreme” abstraction and “extreme” figuration. This is very interesting in terms of discussing what might validate a painting today, and aligning in terms of Schwabsky’s view that the best paintings are
those which refuse to be categorised in any specific dichotomous position.
Discussion of findings
Maria Doubrovskaia (2018) notes:
Since the dawn of the 20t century, history of art in the west has been defined by the tension between figuration and abstraction. Until relatively recently these modes of representation alternated, passing in and out of fashion and competing for the favour of the critics and the general public. In this day and age however this juxtaposition is no longer as severe as it has been in the past.
More recently, in a 2023 article entitled ‘Is the figuration boom over?’, The Art Newspaper declared ‘every decade or so, the art world likes to declare that either figurative painting or abstract painting is dead’ (Shaw 2023).
Meanwhile, curator Gary Garrels at Gagosian stated, ‘What I’ve found is that we’re at a moment of extraordinary diversity there’s no single approach, there’s no single movement’ (Shaw 2023).
In the art world, none has been so polarising as the debate between abstract vs. figurative art. Today however, it could be argued that it is no longer possible to argue that abstraction is superior to figuration or vice versa. The very notion of a strict distinction between these two styles has arguably become obsolete (Gahiga 2024), and as Schwabsky argues – the best paintings are those free from conventions of either representation or abstraction. Schwabsky further elaborates that the best artists are those who have found their freedom in their distance from conventions of representation and abstraction both. This clearly aligns with findings in the Hamburger Kunsthalle’s most recent painting acquisitions of contemporary art – which hovers at point 5 – exactly in the middle of the polarised abstraction and figuration, thus their average painting appears to be free from conventions of categorised abstraction or figuration.
Francis Bacon once explained his art to David Sylvester as ‘a kind of tightrope walk between what is called figurative painting and abstraction.’ He continued, ‘It will go right out from abstraction, but will really have nothing to do with it. It’s an attempt to bring the figurative thing up on to the nervous system more violently and more poignantly’ (Schwabsky 2015). In many different ways
painters before and since Bacon have been walking this tightrope between abstraction and the recognisable image. Even though the Tate’s most recent acquisitions have been largely figurative, this may be changing. At just 27, Jadé Fadojutimi is the youngest artist to be ever collected by the Tate. Fadojutimi’s vibrant paintings in oil pastel toe the line between figuration and total abstraction. Her work is a merging of influences ranging from Japanese anime, Berber textiles, fashion, and objects that constitute her everyday life.
So now, let’s return to Barry Schwabsky’s thoughts on contemporary painting. Today’s painting - according to Schwabsky at the time of editing the blockbuster compendium of painting Vitamin P (2002)persistently refuses its own self-containment and is largely mannerist in mode. In common with contemporary neo-conceptual, installation and video art, it tends to manipulate existing historical models from an earlier era of progressive avantgardism into gratuitous or mannerist variations. Which is not necessarily a bad thing (Mac Giola Leith 2004).
In the best instances, Schwabsky (2022) claims, these variations take on a real intellectual and emotional force of their own (Mac Giola Leith 2004). And so we observe that Schwabsky noted that our contemporary painting is largely mannerist in style. What might we understand by the term ‘Mannerist’? The Tate define this as a ‘sixteenth century style of art and design characterised by artificiality, elegance and sensuous distortion of the human figure’.
WhereHighRenaissanceartemphasisesproportion, balance, and ideal beauty, Mannerism exaggerates such qualities, often resulting in compositions that are asymmetrical or unnaturally elegant (Gombrich 2007). Notable for its artificial (as opposed to naturalistic) qualities (Finocchio 2003), this artistic style privileges compositional tension and instability rather than the balance and clarity of earlier Renaissance painting. Mannerism in literature and music is notable for its highly florid style and intellectual sophistication (Gombrich 2004).
Here, interestingly, Gombrich’s ‘unnatural elegance’ may refer to the lack of either abstraction or figuration – although as noted, the men’s paintings in the sample tended to edge towards the figurative, whereas the female painters erred towards an
abstraction (or rather, the validation1 insisted that men’s paintings were more figurative in content, and the women’s paintings more abstract).
Female
painters and the lean towards abstraction
There is an interesting finding presented within this research – in that female painters tend to lean towards abstraction. This is also supported by research presented by Betterton twenty years ago (2004) in Unframed: Practices and Politics of Women’s Contemporary Paint. Here it is stated that abstract female painters have been acknowledged in ‘unprecedented numbers’ by comparison to female figurative painters Indeed, Fortnum (2004) argues that the use of abstraction in paintings made by women was a feminist or gender-based statement, in that it forms a refusal to present a recognisable image to the male viewer, and thus a refusal of women to become a passive-viewed subject
1 Validation in this context refers to selection committees, curators, collectors etc – those who “gatekeep”.
Today, emerging scholars argue that figuration in female painting is essential to pursue political messages, particularly in relation to Middle Eastern art (WANA2 regions) which is generally speaking rich in motifs and symbolism (see for example Karami, 2024; Alotaibi, 2024 etc.). This does indeed raise the following questions which might be worthy of further debate:
– how do our representations show difference between cultures?
- does this only work if there is some depiction of the recognisable within a painting?
- and where might that leave abstract art?
2 West Asia North Africa (WANA) is a new term derived by University of Dundee scholar Mahtab Karami, in our effort to cease referring to such regions as the “Middle East” which many object to as this is very much a colonialist term.
Concluding statement
This paper summarises previous research and presents new facts on national collections of abstract/figurative or representative paintings. It has aimed to open up a number of areas for discussion. Gender also plays a key part in painting research, one which is very often a contentious issue to those who paint or engage with research on painting. There remains a clear tension on the spectrum of abstraction and figuration. “Tension” however may not be the correct word. Schwabsky refers to this as a tightrope walk. Perhaps the term funambulism (‘the skill of walking along a thin wire or rope’) is indeed a more appropriate term for the issue. It has a long tradition in various countries and is commonly associated with the circus. Personally, I have long been fascinated with the circus, as a spectacle that challenges the limits of what we think we are able to do. It is skilled, daring, and exciting. I very much see this here at Alex Roberts’ curated exhibition of the wonderful paintings by G.R.I.T selected artists – and now that I have had chance to see these works in person, am excited to go away from
here and start to write, perhaps more subjectively, on the artworks included within this important exhibition.
More importantly, I am excited to hear what G.R.I.T. artists and curator might feel about the spectrum of abstraction/figuration - or the “funambulism” of abstraction and figuration in contemporary painting. Where does this enable the place of painting today? How does this enable us to explore artists’ unique sense of self as a visual, visceral experience of painted gesture? In particular, something that might require further interrogation is Schwabsky’s probing of what painting can become - in an observer’s encounter with it. And why might the observer’s perception play such a key role in the creation of “successful” or able-to-be-validated paintings?
With gratitude to Alex Roberts for her tremendous hard work in bringing G.R.I.T together on its first journey in Berlin.
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